INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGINEERING DESIGN, ICED13 19-22 AUGUST 2013, SUNGKYUNKWAN UNIVERSITY, SEOUL, KOREA DESIGN FOR FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS ENABLED BY A MECHANISM AND MACHINE ELEMENT TAXONOMY Szu-Hung LEE, Pingfei JIANG, Peter RN CHILDS Imperial College London, United Kingdom ABSTRACT A process providing an option for engineers and designers to separate the consideration of functional requirements and movement requirements to encourage diverse thinking has been developed and implemented in a graphical interface. In order to assist in consideration of attributes, a database, mechanism and machine element taxonomy (MMET), has been constructed. MMET is composed of the functional attributes, movement attributes, and advantages and disadvantages of machine elements and mechanisms. It provides engineers and designers a wide range of component selection to fulfil design requirements and reliable references to make decisions. Three different interfaces such as hierarchy, functional-oriented and movement-oriented are defined to allow users to explore different options and purposes. This taxonomy also provides comparative information between elements, mechanisms with the same main technical functions. With this information contained in MMET and with the additional aid of a functional analysis diagram (FAD) approach, engineers and designers are able to explore flaws in current designs and deliver alternative solutions by following a proposed creative optimizing process. Keywords: conceptual design, design process, optimisation, process modelling, functional analysis Contact: Szu-Hung Lee Imperial College London Mechanical Engineering London SW7 2AZ United Kingdom
[email protected] ICED13/373 1 1 INTRODUCTION As a multi-disciplinary subject, engineering design involves not only technological but also human- interactive and organisational issues. Competition to develop products with enriched functions and improved quality in a time and resource efficient manner drives an interest in design process research.